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Saint Roque González de Santa Cruz was born in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, on 17 November 1576. He came from a noble Spanish family but also spoke the local language, Guaraní, from an early age.

He was ordained priest at the age of 22 and joined the Jesuits in 1609 to work as a missionary. He was the first European to enter the region that is now the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Delicate diplomacy was required to convince the local Indian leaders that he, as a priest, was not there to prepare the way for European settlement of the land.

From 1613 onwards he founded several of the Jesuit ‘reductions’ which brought Indians together to learn to live in settlements. The ‘reductions’ later became part of Brazil as a result of a territorial exchange between the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and because of the support they gave the Indians as against the colonial authorities, they were one of the reasons for the suppression of the Jesuits by the Portuguese Empire in the mid-18th century.

In the region of Iyuí (now in Brazil) he had difficulties with the local chieftain and sorcerer (‘cacique’) Nheçu (Spanish ‘Ñezú’), who had him killed on 15 November 1628, along with his Spanish companions Juan de Castillo and Alfonso Rodríguez.

They were beatified in 1934 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 16 May 1988.

Other saints: St Raphael Kalinowski (1835-1907)

19 Nov (where celebrated)

Raphael Kalinowski was born to Polish parents in the city of Vilnius in 1835. Following military service, he was condemned in 1864 to ten years of forced labour in Siberia. In 1877, he became a Discalced Carmelite and was ordained a priest in 1882. He contributed greatly to the restoration of many Discalced Carmelite communities in Poland that had previously been suppressed under Russian occupation. His life was distinguished by zeal for Church unity and by his unflagging devotion to his ministry as a confessor and spiritual director. He died in Wadowice, Austria-Hungary, in 1907.

MT

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: Saint Andrew of Crete (650? - 720/740?)

St Andrew of Crete is of great importance in the Orthodox Church because he invented – or at least introduced into the liturgy – the canon, a new form of hymnody of which there is no sign before his time. Canons are huge, elaborately structured musical and poetic compositions. Andrew’s immense “Greek Canon”, for instance, is a hymn 250 verses long interspersed with litanies and odes, takes three hours to chant, and goes chronologically through the entire Old and New Testaments, showing examples of the need for repentance and conversion.

The canon, as a genre, has never taken real root in the rest of Christendom, but in addition to his achievements as a hymnographer Andrew was a noted preacher of sermons and discourses, and it is extracts from these that form some of our Second Readings. As might be expected from such a poet they are clear and inspiring, deriving their effect more from the arrangement of images and episodes so that one reflects and illuminates another, rather than from closely-argued pieces of reasoning.

Liturgical colour: green

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the season in which we are being neither especially penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).

A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord, with the Lord for his hope. He is like a tree by the waterside that thrusts its roots to the stream: when the heat comes it feels no alarm, its foliage stays green; it has no worries in a year of drought, and never ceases to bear fruit.

Happy the man who discovers wisdom, the man who gains discernment: gaining her is more rewarding than silver, more profitable than gold. She is beyond the price of pearls, nothing you could covet is her equal.